Rivers of Gold Read online

  And where did More go after he finished his shift? McKeutchen had shrugged and said he probably went back to the ESU in Brooklyn. Or picked up extra CAB shifts on the weekends. Santiago knew that was a lie, because the weekends belonged to the Narc Sharks, who frowned on any other cops, even brother CAB cops, poaching on their turf. In the same way civilians used to look forward to the weekends as a time to party, the Narc Sharks viewed weekends as a bonanza of credits. The holding tank bulged with their drag hauls from Thursday night to Monday morning. The only other team in the unit whose credit count was even remotely close was that of Santiago and More, perhaps owing to More’s loose interpretation of individual rights.

  The night things came to a head and Santiago decided to investigate his partner had not begun in any unusual way. For weeks, the drag hauls had been getting worse. The sort of random “stranger violence” that typically occurred at night in neighborhoods emptied by the real estate bust was now taking place in otherwise low-crime areas at all hours, a trend confirmed by a month-long series of consecutively grim COMSTAT reports. To make matters worse, a new hobby with the street moniker “mad-dogging” was threatening to become a city pastime. The activity had begun as a form of separation anxiety for the thousands of newly unemployed who could no longer shop at the kinds of stores nor eat at the kinds of restaurants they once took for granted. Crowds would form at the windows, looking in at those lucky enough to enjoy what they themselves now could not. The first incidents were merely disruptive and profane. The spiral did not take long. Groups of youngsters began trying to outdo each other with feats of daring, such as running through restaurants tearing tablecloths off tables, sending knives and broken glass flying in the faces of terrified diners. Soon widespread reports of drunken and drug-fueled criminal entries were clogging the airwaves. A new charge, EAR (Entering, Assault, and Rape), was being entered on indictments around the city. The ensuing drop-off in restaurant traffic drove dozens of establishments out of business; merchant security responses, such as full-body friskings required upon entry, closed dozens more. Now streets formerly resplendent with glittering, prosperous stores stood lined with shuttered, padlocked gates. Those surviving stores now bristled with the sort of security countermeasures usually reserved for the UN: security cameras, armed guards, even concrete blast barriers. Ever looking to the classical past, Ralph Lauren had festooned the doors and windows of his stores with barbed wire, and deployed jackbooted private K-9 security guards with massive drooling Rottweilers and Alsatians in his twin mansion flagships on Madison Avenue.

  The mass of store closings was a body blow to the city’s tax revenue. The dying restaurant scene, however, together with the City Council’s ill-conceived price caps on landowners (meant to keep businesses and tenants in their locations), begat a parallel economy of illegal restaurants and bars. This shadow world of mobile clubs, the locations of which were often available only hours before opening time via a coterie of electronically linked insiders, allowed for a resurgence of a sophisticated drug trade that remained frustratingly out of reach of the overburdened police department, stretched thin as it was by a surge in violence fueled by cheap, highly addictive street drugs like paco. Since the well-organized, exclusive, mobile supper clubs and speakeasies did not have anywhere near the levels of violence being borne by the brick-and-mortar businesses of New York, The Powers That Be at City Hall and One Police Plaza did not deem them as immediate a threat as the wave of EAR crimes (known colloquially as “EARgasms” among the rank and file). Hence fewer police investigations, hence a burgeoning underground nightlife, the likes of which hadn’t existed since the repeal of Prohibition in 1933.

  Except, of course, for a few crusty, pain-in-the-ass dinosaurs in the chain of command, who refused to toe the party line on the grounds it was strangling the city. Men like McKeutchen, who had nurtured and cultivated loyal pups like Santiago, grooming them to follow in the paw prints of salty NYPD dogs like Joseph Petrosino.

  “Who?” asked Santiago.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” growled McKeutchen. “More, wait here a minute. Shut the door.”

  When he looked back on it all much later, Santiago would reflect that that had been the last straw, McKeutchen shutting him out like that on that fateful night. The captain had periodically done that over the six months he and More had ridden together, taking More into his confidence behind his slammed office door. Santiago had come to think of himself as McKeutchen’s golden boy, and the sight of an interloper like More getting the same preferential treatment made him feel left out and jealous, something he would admit to no man.

  And so he decided to test his budding investigative skills out on More. After all, he reasoned, if you can’t trust your partner, who can you trust?

  It probably wouldn’t have come to pass at all, Santiago thought later, if he’d just let the drag die.

  They’d rolled on an assault call straight from dinner, which was takeout from Santiago’s favorite Peruvian restaurant in Spanish Harlem. Santiago had thrust his order of parihuela at More (who never seemed to eat anything, the weird fuck), fired up the siren and wig-wag lights hidden in the Crown Vic’s grille, and screeched the cab over to the Conservatory Garden along Central Park’s northeastern edge at 103rd and Fifth.

  Jumping the front wheels onto the curb, Santiago put the lights on an unconscious nurse, and a drag geeked to the gills on paco doing his best to separate a moaning, drooling geriatric from her oxygen tank–equipped wheelchair, which would probably retail enough on the street for enough dope to kill the drag and six others like him. Santiago figured the nurse had wheeled the old bag of bones out to the garden from the Cardinal Cook Medical Center across the street to take the evening air. Up jumped the junkie, and here they all were.

  As usual, More was out the door before Santiago brought the cab to a full stop. As usual, the drag never saw him coming. This time, however, More used a short, vicious technique Santiago didn’t recognize, although there was no mistaking the loud crack that followed. The drag took one look at the fractured radius poking through the skin of his forearm, and promptly passed out. The broken bone had severed vital vessels on its way to the great outdoors, and a pool of blood formed rapidly under the drag’s inert form, spreading in a zigzag pattern through the mortar of the garden’s old brick sidewalk.

  Santiago, with blood thumping in his ears and wrists, cilantro rice sticking to his forehead over his bulging eyes, pointed out that the suspect needed emergency medical attention.

  “Why?” rasped More.

  “What do they teach in ESU school, how to burn the fucking police manual?” Santiago gasped as he tried to pull the drag’s wounded arm above heart level without doing further damage. “Help me tie this off.”

  “Why?” More repeated, as still as the unconscious junkie.

  “More, just shut up and HELP ME!” Santiago bellowed. He didn’t know which was more frustrating: that he was telling a nearly mute man to shut up; or that he had been partnered with said mute, who, among other things, seemed okay with letting an injured suspect publicly bleed to death. Santiago saw all his prospects dribbling away with the junkie’s blood, and knew what he needed to do was to get this suspect across the street to the hospital, then get himself straight with McKeutchen. If the junkie died later, fine, his own ass would be covered. More could go take a flying fuck, there were plenty of other eager-beaver applicants for CAB who wouldn’t jeopardize Santiago’s career on a routine drag haul.

  As things turned out, Santiago might have hoped for better.

  The trio of burly orderlies who rushed across the street when they saw the taxicab on the curb with an overturned wheelchair in front of it weren’t prepared to like the cops, who they figured had just run over their ward. When they found out the drag had coldcocked the nurse, who was well liked and respected around the hospital, as well as terrorized an invalid octogenarian who never raised her voice to any of the staff, well, they just weren’t prepared to guarantee the you
ng thug’s safety once he was brought onto the premises. Things did not improve when Santiago asked to speak to the chief medical officer, and instead got a quivering resident whose pupils were clearly dilated by something stronger than coffee. The resident said, like, they had no beds, and, um, maybe they’d be better off taking this, uh, patient down the street to Mount Sinai?

  “What about the Hippocratic oath?” Santiago demanded, growing more disgusted by the minute as the drag kept leaking onto the bricks. From behind him More made some kind of coarse glottal sound, while in front of him the ursine orderlies openly snorted and sneered.

  “Can you at least tie him off so he won’t bleed out while we take him down there?” Santiago asked through grinding teeth. But he could see it was a lost cause, the orderlies were bundling up the elderly patient and the nurse and carrying them across the street, and the resident was, like, I mean, y’know, see ya.

  Santiago watched them leave, feeling very much like he was back in the waiting room of St. Vincent’s, being told that Bertie Goldstein was basically toast and nothing in that great fortress of medical knowledge, technical wizardry, and pools of public and private funding could save her. Briefly he wondered if he could manage a head shot on the wired young resident at this range.

  More’s latex gloves snapped him out of it. All CAB cops rolled with gloves and masks in their kit, as standard as badge and cuffs. Santiago watched, fascinated, as More tied off and splinted the drag’s arm in less than a minute using the drag’s own belt and a ballpoint pen. “Damn, they teach you good knots in ESU, huh?” Santiago offered lamely, his earlier adrenaline rush ebbing.

  More ignored him and pointed to the backdoor of the cab. Santiago opened it and started to reach for the drag’s foot to heave him inside, but More snapped the latex twice against his wrist, and Santiago nodded, reaching for his own gloves. With infection rates where they were (current HHS estimates claimed one in three New Yorkers had herpes, while one in six was HIV positive), no chances were taken with bleeders, biters, or open wounds like this.

  They managed to get the drag levered into the backseat with a minimum of cursing (More his usual silent self), then clambered into the front seats. Santiago called it in and left word with the ops dispatcher to tell the CAB duty sergeant to raise McKeutchen to get in touch ASAP, knowing there was little chance of that. The duty sergeant was an alcoholic wreck named Felch, who was marking his last thirty days before retirement and could hardly be bothered to sign his name. Santiago could hear the phlegmatic wheeze in Felch’s voice over the radio, and wondered how sauced he already was.

  Checking the clock, he smiled for the first time that night. There was one person he knew he could count on who could help him salvage this mess.

  And she had just started her shift at Mount Sinai.

  They just managed to roll the drag up on a gurney next to the nurse’s station in time to catch Esperanza Santiago chewing the ass off some nitwit nurse somewhere. “You’ll like this,” Santiago told More, who ignored him as usual.

  They awkwardly carried the unconscious drag between them, each with one hand on the back of the drag’s belt and one on his frayed collar, since putting his arms over their shoulders would probably soak them in blood (never mind killing the drag). There were of course no gurneys or staff available anywhere, so they just propped the drag upright in a chair in the waiting area, More looking around for someone to deal with the imminent pool of blood while Santiago filled the pass-through section of the Nurse Triage Unit with his bulk. On the other side of it stood his sister, Esperanza, in her starched whites, a stethoscope around her neck, a blood-pressure cuff in one hand, a clipboard in the other, with the phone cradled against her neck and an expression of annoyed determination on her face. Santiago knew the look, and the conversation in which she was involved, quite well.

  “ …no debe ser más de doce horas. Asegúrese de que el paciente tiene un montón de líquidos. Si pulso y la temperatura son constantes, después de doce horas que usted pueda cumplir. Asegúrese de que todos los funcionarios que entran en contacto con el paciente use guantes y mascarilla en todo momento, y se han ordenado en un modo en espera, con las restricciones en caso de DO NOT INTERRUPT ME WHILE I’M SPEAKING en caso de que el paciente recaídas. Usted me llamó para solicitar ayuda debido a que no saben cómo manejar este paciente, no me interrumpan mientras. Estoy dándole instrucciones sobre cómo hacerlo. Estoy tratando de explicar cómo se puede salvar el culo y las de sus compañeros de trabajo, no necesitan más retrasos. Si usted tiene un problema con eso, pruebe con otro NTU. Tres del CC, doce horas, del médico y comprobar que la puerta.” She slammed down the phone. “What?”

  Santiago pointed to the drag in the chair, his jury-rigged arm sling listing badly, a small stain on the floor beneath him slowly spreading. Esperanza took in the sight at a glance, then rolled her head in a three-quarter circle coming to rest with her eyes fixed in exasperation upon Santiago, a trait common among all the women of his family, which had been demonstrated to him countless times over countless meals. He heard her slap on the gloves, heard her page the attending, heard her shouting commands to someone, but as usual, all he saw was the scar on her right temple, just above and to the left of her mole.

  The scar was barely visible to anyone other than Santiago anymore, Esperanza having learned to artfully conceal it with makeup and hairstyle. Cosmetic surgery, even for someone in her profession, was an inordinately expensive luxury that she could not justify to herself, preferring instead to wear it as a reminder. Though they had long since stopped talking about it, Santiago was secretly proud of her for retaining it.

  The scar’s giver was a piece of shit named Nestor, who’d been in the tenth grade heading for trouble when Esperanza came into the eighth. She was just beginning to form then, with budding curves and glowing skin punctuated by a mole near her right eye that gave her a look that seemed to set boys’ teeth on edge. Nestor was in a loose confederacy of loud, reckless boys that everyone, including a much younger Santiago, could see was destined for prison or early death. They roughed up younger students, disrupted classes, and threatened teachers with violence (making good on at least one of them, although no arrests were ever made). By the time Esperanza was unlucky enough to catch Nestor’s attention, he and several others in his group were openly using drugs, and a few were suspected of selling them as well. Not that anything was done about it, not in a school where students outnumbered teachers forty to one and the only security came at the beginning and the end of the day, when NYPD school squads were deployed (and which, in down years, were the first units to be cut when budgets were slashed). Really, it was better just to stay out of the way of boys like Nestor and his ilk, until graduation or something else took you away from the zoo that was George Washington in the waning years of the crack wars.

  Nestor was really the worst of the worst, the dynamic of coalitional aggression embodied in a punk. He wasn’t even the gang’s leader—that title definitely belonged to Alejandro Zayas, a vicious brute in his own right who was silently regarded by the student body as a rapist, probably responsible for at least two girls’ quitting high school with burgeoning bellies. Nobody came for Alejandro, which emboldened him into progressively more brazen behavior. And if Alejandro could do it, then runner-up Nestor, with chips on both shoulders, just had to outdo him, to prove himself even more of a badass and thereby keep himself from being eclipsed by Alejandro’s shadow.

  The fledgling Santiago had warned his sister about the looks and leers she was getting from Nestor when she was unfortunate enough to pass by him in the halls or cafeteria, where the close proximity of so many enervated young bodies made the air a viscous soup of pheromones and tension. The slightest provocation, real or imagined, could set off an explosion. Santiago had memorized his sister’s class schedule that semester, and tried to follow her between classes. But he couldn’t always be where she was, and she had to tell him for years afterward that there was no way he could blame himself for n
ot being there the day Nestor dragged her into a bathroom and tried to rape her. Tried, because Esperanza kicked his kneecap hard enough for her to get out from under him and flee, though not before he’d connected a solid right to her cheekbone, one of his rings tearing the flesh near her mole. Esperanza staggered but did not stop. She ran and ran, all the way to her father’s machine shop, where Victor hugged her to his chest and smoothed her hair and told her everything would be fine, all the while glaring over her shoulder at his youngest son, who had seen her from a school window running like the devil himself was chasing her, and who unbeknownst to her had sprinted behind her all the way from school and now stood panting in the shop’s office doorway, reading a new meaning in his father’s silent scowl.

  It took about three weeks. Santiago shadowed Nestor around school and beyond, learning his habits, watching for patterns. He knew he would not stand out in a crowd. Nestor wouldn’t think twice about him, might not even know him at all. Still, Santiago was careful not to let himself be seen while Nestor was in the company of Alejandro and his cronies.

  Three weeks.

  At the end of the third, Santiago knew what time Nestor would be by himself, under the stairs on Fort George Avenue just behind the school, smoking a blunt and sucking on a bottle of Cobra, tripping on the raindrops falling from the crosshatched beams of the overhead trestles. Santiago knew by now how long it would take Nestor to finish his smoke and a good part of his bottle, how long it would take for him to sink into a righteous daze. He knew exactly where the light reached up under the stairs at that time of day, even when the sun was out, so he knew where to crouch just a little beyond that, in the dark, watching Nestor get his lift on. Watched and waited for thirty-two minutes, holding a seven-and-a-half-inch length of three-quarter-inch cold-rolled steel pipe he’d brought along from his father’s shop.